


You Can't Love Someone Back To Life

by thehighestide



Category: The Social Network (2010)
Genre: But they're doomed to tragedy, Character Death, Eduardo Misses Mark, Even though Mark betrayed him, Grieving!Eduardo, Hence the G rating, I'm Sorry, M/M, Mark is dead, No descriptions of death, One Shot, Short One Shot, These two deserve so much better, Traces Of Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-12
Updated: 2017-06-12
Packaged: 2018-11-13 04:18:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11176866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehighestide/pseuds/thehighestide
Summary: Eduardo changes up one little thing this time and wonders if it will matter.





	You Can't Love Someone Back To Life

**Author's Note:**

> This is pure fiction based on the movie The Social Network, which is a somewhat fictitious take on real world happenings. I take no credit for anything except my own thoughts and ideas.

 

    It had been a long time, but then again, every year is a long time. Every year is a long time until this particular day comes around, and then it feels like time has sped up until Eduardo is standing in front of an unassuming grey gravestone with a hollow feeling in his throat, a black hole in his stomach, a galaxy in his eyes.

  

    He can do all he wants. He can kick at dirt or wish upon dandelion fluff, but nothing brings back the dead, and he knows this very intimately. Very truly. Very deeply. The dead stay dead, but the living don't stay living. It's a wonderful juxtaposition that he ponders until laughter bubbles from his chest into his mouth, and before he knows it he's on his knees, the mud soaking uncomfortably through black slacks. His hand covers his eyes but tilting his head skyward only helps gravity in pulling salt water tears down, down, down. 

 

    His very center of existence feels like it's being tugged to the center of the earth. As if someone wrapped a string around his heart and wrenched it taut. He reckons that if that someone pulled on it, he would follow without a fight, because anything has to be better than feeling loss, surely. 

 

    And it's ironic that the one time he should prefer silence, he wants nothing more than a surly voice and a steady presence beside him, wracking up a savings account of dry innuendos and acerbic wit that belongs in a chemistry lab, next to the acids and bases and the fume hood, so that it won't cause damage to the surroundings. Eduardo had always been made of whatever he needed to be. Steel and Diamond around his father, sponge and stone at school, granite and tissues as a child, hugs and litmus paper for Mark. 

 

    He supposes it should be fitting that losing Mark makes he felt closer to him, rather than father away. As if the very delicate veil of death only shielded from faux emotions and leeway lies, a semi permeable membrane that Mark probably hates now because it means that the full brunt of Eduardo's emotions were sailing across the universe to him. 

 

    Eduardo sits there for a long time, until the sun peaks through the edge of the sky in small slices, through a gaping wound that stitches itself closed one more time until the next. Eduardo doesn't dare touch Mark's grave. Doesn't imagine that he could even if he wanted to. He sits on the ground, which isn't cold enough, and stares at the familiar words etched in stone, and wonders what Mark would say if he saw him in this very moment. Would his voice go up like it always had when he was surprised, or down in disappointment? 

 

    Maybe he wouldn't say anything at all. 

 

    It takes Eduardo too long before he stands up and brushes the dirt and dried mud from his slacks. It takes a even longer before he can force himself to walk away, legs bucking under the weight of what feels like worlds. It feels unnatural to be walking away from Mark again, or perhaps it's too natural. It was always inevitable. He's done it today and he'll do it next year, and the year after that, and the year after that until his legs won't work anymore and they'll lay him down in the dirt, too. 

 

    He doesn't know when he decides to turn around so that he's walking backwards, back to the gate, but it happens. His eyes remain trained on an unassuming grey gravestone that is like so many others; will probably be just like his one day. He figures that it's been enough of the same old story time after time again. He walked away once with his back to what mattered most. Repeatedly, actually, and it cost him every time. Maybe if he changes up one small variable the whole thing will come crashing down on his head and he'll wake up tomorrow feeling like a better man. 

 

    He nearly trips twice, branches and the odd stick in the mud blundering his steps, but he carries on. The cold of the gate eventually bumps against his thighs uncomfortably, and at this point he can't even make up Mark's grave from all the others, it's a speck, a dot, a star in a galaxy, and he's about to turn around and leave when something...flickers. 

 

    A mirage, surely. A person, or lint in Eduardo's eye, something that shouldn't be there, wasn't there a millisecond ago. His breath gets caught somewhere between lungs and trachea, and Eduardo can't blink as a figure in a grey sweatshirt, back hunched like broken spindles and bent twigs, turns to him from afar. It hurts like a bitch, is probably a hallucination, and it's cruel. But Eduardo deserves cruel, wants cruel to take the weight off his shoulders and into the palms of his hands so he can let it go. 

 

    "Mark." 

 

    His voice is broken, a single syllable rendered soundless into a chasm that shouldn't exist, and between one moment and the next, the wind snatches the figure away too soon, and Eduardo is left with a name on the tip of his tongue and the echoes of time and space singing one last word to him before he leaves the graveyard, only to return in three-hundred-and-sixty-five days from today. 

 

_Wardo_.

**Author's Note:**

> This just came to me and I wrote it in one sitting. Is it terrible that I don't even have a backstory to Mark's death? Or any information for what year this is supposed to take place in? Or where it's taking place, or any commentary on how Facebook fares without Mark, or anything of substance really. I'll leave it to you guys to think about. 
> 
> Also, title taken from a line in 13 Reasons Why.


End file.
